Spiked (magazine)

Spiked
Web address	spiked-online.com
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Politics
Registration	No
Owner	Brendan O'Neill
Created by	Mick Hume
Launched	2000

Spiked (also written as sp!ked) is a British Internet magazine focusing on politics, culture and society from a humanist and libertarian viewpoint.

Editors and contributors

Spiked is edited by Brendan O'Neill,^[1] following Mick Hume's departure in January 2007, and features regular contributions from James Heartfield, Michael Fitzpatrick, Patrick West, Rob Lyons, Nathalie Rothschild, Tim Black, Duleep Allirajah, Tom Slater, Joanna Williams and Frank Furedi.

Origin

The magazine was founded in 2000 after the bankruptcy of its predecessor, Living Marxism (LM).

LM closed after losing a libel case brought against it by the broadcasting corporation ITN. The case centered around ITN coverage of Fikret Alić and other Bosnian Muslims standing behind a barbed-wire fence at the Trnopolje camp during the Yugoslav war. LM opposed Western intervention on traditional anti-imperialist grounds, and thus warned against the tendency to moralise the conflict – with Muslims portrayed as the victims and Serbs as the villains – which was fuelling the clamour for military action. LM published an article titled "The Picture that Fooled the World"^[2] which claimed that ITN's coverage was deceptive, the barbed-wire did not enclose the camp and the Muslims were in fact "refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished." During the court case, evidence given by the camp doctor led LM to abandon its defence. ITN was awarded damages and costs, estimated to be around £1 million.^[3]

The case resulted in significant controversy over the relationship between British libel laws and press freedom; it also stimulated some discussion over the use of the word "genocide" in relation to the murders at Srebrenica. The MIT Professor Noam Chomsky insisted in an interview with The Guardian that "LM was probably correct", and that "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."

Stance

Spiked focuses on issues of freedom and state control, science and technology, culture, education and literature.

The magazine opposes all forms of censorship, by the state or otherwise. Its writers call for a repeal of libel,^[4] hate speech^[5] and incitement^[6][7] laws, and of censorship on university campuses. They have criticised laws targeted at paedophiles as counterproductive to rehabilitation and conducive to mob violence.^[8] Spiked also regularly critique risk society, political correctness, and environmentalism. As regards the latter, a particular Spiked target has been what they see as "exaggerated" and "hysterical" interpretations of the scientific consensus on global warming, and what they argue are double-standards advocated by more advanced Western nations for self-serving reasons.^[9]

Spiked opposes all restrictions to immigration and freedom of movement, favouring entirely open international borders. It regards policies of multiculturalism as government-sanctioned cultural segregation masquerading as tolerance, which unhealthily overemphasise differences between people. Other notable positions of Spiked are their opposition to the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and Western interference in developing nations in general.^[10][11][12] It seeks to counter what it sees as a recent trend in Western foreign policy: humanitarian intervention.^[13]

Some have said that Spiked's stance has more in common with libertarianism than with the mainstream left.^[14]

Frank Furedi, interviewed in Spiked, responded that the stance of LM and Spiked springs from the tradition of the "anti-Stalinist left". He argued that the reason why many in the left tradition have difficulties in identifying these ideas with the left is that they completely misunderstand the humanist political position of being progressive in terms of human progress, science, rationality and freedom, and yet be completely anti-state:

...much of the left in the twentieth century tended to be influenced by Stalinist and Social-Democratic traditions, which means they could not imagine that you could be left-wing and anti-state...so they were confused by us. But that was their fault, not ours. It was a product of their own abandonment of liberty in favour of ideas about state control.^[15]

Furedi listed Marxist activists, politicians and writers who he said had influenced LM and Spiked, including Roman Rosdolsky, Henryk Grossman, György Lukács, Paul Mattick, Christian Rakovsky, and Leon Trotsky.

Therapy Culture

A long-standing thread in the Spiked critique is what they identify as 'Therapy Culture' – a culture where the victim takes ascendancy and where rationality and logic is replaced by emotions and feelings.^[16] For Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, the core issues here are about agency and political autonomy and he argues "we should stop surrendering our sovereignty to the 'therapeutic state'".

The medicalisation of personal problems may relieve the individual of moral responsibility, but at the cost of allowing the therapeutic state to control personal behaviour and psychic life.^[17]

Environmentalism and global warming

Spiked has been consistently critical of environmentalism. It accuses environmentalism of misanthropy for supporting cuts in population and economic growth, rather than investment in technological improvements, particularly in response to climate change. James Heartfield, for instance, argues that the environmentalist concern with cutting back growth is linked to elitist prejudices:

The ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses ... Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who must make sacrifices.^[18]

Spiked has not denied that human carbon emissions are contributing to climate change. Spiked criticises what it sees as the political interpretation of this fact put forward by the environmentalist movement. For example, in 2007 James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky argued that "the IPCC's fairly sober summary of climate science has been spun [by environmentalists] to tell a story of Fate, Doom and human folly."^[9] Josie Appleton argued that: "Today's 'global warming story' — where morality equates to carbon calculating – owes more to the anxious zeitgeist than scientific findings."^[19]

Spiked criticises environmentalists for preferring to reduce economic growth in response to climate change, rather than to expand it by finding improved alternative sources of energy. Furedi argues that "innovation is necessary, not only to deal with climate change, but also to produce a great deal more inexpensive energy in order that more people can enjoy the fruits of modern society."^[20] Spiked contributors have thus written in defence of hydroelectric^[21] and nuclear power,^[22] often dismissed by environmentalist campaigners.

Spiked Review of Books

The Spiked Review of Books is a monthly online literary criticism feature, based at Spiked. The launch in May 2007 coincided with controversy in the United States following the scaling back of newspaper book review sections.^[23] The Spiked Review of Books features editorials by Brendan O'Neill and interviews, essays and reviews by a range of writers, many of whom are regular contributors to Spiked, such as Frank Furedi, Jennie Bristow and Josie Appleton. The cover illustrations are by Jan Bowman.

Funding

Spiked receives its funding via the organising of debates, surveys, seminars and conferences, with a variety of partners, sponsors and organisations. It also receives donations from readers.

See also

• Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978)

References

External links

• Sp!ked Online
• Theresa Clifford: Is Wikipedia part of a new ‘global brain’? (Spiked article)
• Lobbywatch entry on Spiked
• Frank Furedi Official Website
• Mick Hume's column in The Times
• James Woudhuysen Website
• James Heartfield Website
• A Response to Spiked on Ethiopia's Floods and Dams by International Rivers